It’s the kind of news no mom wants to hear, especially not on a festive weekend.

On Saturday morning, political activist Devorah Halberstam, who is a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect, got a knock on her door from a New York Police Department officer. Her son was in Israel for the holidays with his wife and children, and Halberstam knew nothing about the danger facing them after Hamas attacked Israel, killing as many as 1,000 civilians, hours earlier – until the officer told her about the violence unfolding in the Middle East. 

Halberstam said that even though Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, which took place on Saturday and Sunday, are supposed to be happy holidays, she spent the rest of her weekend worrying. She’d later learn that her son’s family concluded the holidays in a bomb shelter. “When you have a child there, you have to scream,” Halberstam, who still grieves the loss of a son who was murdered in an terrorist attack on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, told Shtetl.

Hamas launched its attacks on Saturday morning in Israel, when it was the middle of the night in New York’s Eastern time zone. Even though many Jews who were observing the holidays did not use electricity between Friday night and Sunday night, news traveled to them anyway from a range of sources.

Non-Jewish government officials and synagogue security guards found themselves with a much heavier task than an ordinary “Shabbos goy,” as non-Jews who help observant Jews with certain tasks on holy days are called. Once a few people within the community had heard what happened, news spread quickly by word of mouth.

In a village near Kiryas Joel, Esty Mendlowitz, a member of the Satmar group Bnei Yoel, said she learned about the attack after the mayor of South Blooming Grove came to her family’s synagogue to notify people. 

In Staten Island, New York State Assemblymember Samuel Pirozzolo, who hadn’t known there was a holiday on Sunday, visited his district’s synagogues and mosques with the intention of making sure they were safe – and instead found himself delivering bad news.

“They were shocked,” Pirozzolo told Shtetl. “I think to some degree they were a little bit relieved because they could at least talk about it among themselves and prepare for what to do once the holiday was over.”

In a number of local synagogues that already had elevated security for the holidays, security guards became resources for information about friends and family in Israel, especially as Jewish tradition leads many in Israel to conclude their observances of the holidays a day earlier than many outside of Israel. In one synagogue, that cross-Atlantic connection was particularly tight, one Syrian Jewish woman who declined to be named told Shtetl.

“A boy in a yeshiva [in Israel] remembered the security guard’s phone number from one of the synagogues [in Brooklyn],” the woman, whose brother studies at a Jewish school in Jerusalem, said. “He told the security guard to tell all the moms that all the boys were OK, so that they wouldn’t worry.”

A Hasidic woman in Boro Park who didn’t share her name told Shtetl that although she doesn’t answer the phone on Simchat Torah, she overheard a message left on her answering machine by a relative who lives in Israel, where holiday observances concluded earlier. “It’s just crazy,” the woman said. “If I was there, I would be traumatized.”

Another Hasidic woman in Boro Park, who also didn’t want to be named, said she had learned about the events at synagogue from a representative of Shmira, a Jewish neighborhood watch group, but that after she found out, she didn’t want to spread the word. “On our holiday, we’re not looking to hear bad news,” the woman said. “I started to tell my daughter-in-law what happened, but then I stopped. It’s one of the specific holidays where you’re told to be happy.” 

In Boro Park, a Shmira volunteer told Shtetl the organization has a special team, with non-Jewish people on it, that protects the community during holidays when electricity is not used. He said it was important for people to be aware, lest they face security risks in Brooklyn because of the violence abroad. “People were coming here to find out more details,” the man, who did not share his name, said of the organization’s Boro Park headquarters on 50th Street and 13th Avenue.

Not everyone in the Haredi community actually learned about the events during the holiday. 

Hasidic Boro Park resident Abraham Braun said he only really learned about the tragedy after the holiday ended, but during the holiday, he overheard two people in a sukkah outside of his synagogue who seemed to be talking about it.

“I don’t know how they knew,” Braun said.